Inhofe’s first guest, Cathie Adams, is the President of the Texas Eagle Forum and former Texas GOP chair. She must have felt quite uncomfortable speaking at a United Nations function, as she has maintained for over a decade that the UN was the anti-Christ’s vehicle for stealthily taking over the world. From a 1999 newsletter:

The Bible tells us that in the end times there will be a world government headed by a world leader, called the anti-Christ, who will profess a world religion, but did you ever think you would live in the day when these things would come into being? That is exactly what the United Nations is doing behind the backs of most Americans.

Inhofe’s other guest, Lord Christopher Monckton, has a storied history of making things up, especially with respect to climate science. It’s a pattern Monckton fell into at the Doha negotiations, where he took the platform reserved for the Myanmarese delegation and claimed to be speaking for “Asian coastal nations.” The double pretense got him ejected from the nation of Qatar and banned from every future UN climate summit.

One might think this clown show would embarrass the Senator, but his record suggests otherwise: Inhofe has claimed that climate science is a hoax that contravenes the will of God and is currently working with the Heartland Institute — which suggests that climate change advocates are like the Unabomber — to de-fund the Environmental Protection Agency.

While we may deride the ‘deniers’ like Inhofe et al, we, the posters on the climate blogs, are perhaps ‘deniers’ at a much deeper level. Inhofe et al deny the science of climate change. We, the posters, deny the ever increasing reality that this problem is intractable. There is an outside chance the technical component of climate change could be addressed, but the political/sociological barriers to the sacrifices and changes required allow no chance of success.

The surest way to lose a battle is having the belief that you will be defeated.

Ultimately denying climate change has the same consequences as denying the possibility of solving the problem. Maybe the deniers will have in the future the argument that “yes global warming is real. But it is too late to act, nothing we do will prevent it. The best thing to do is using fossil fuels to power the already collapsing economy”

Saying that there is a solution is not denial, is the strong statement that we MUST act because we CAN do it.

Thank you “From Peru.” This is exactly what I would have said, had you not said it first.

Hope dies with the last breath, and there are solutions, or at least ways we can seriously and rapidly cut back on anthropogenic carbon if and when we do so.

Of course it’s possible that that could happen when it’s too late to stop runaway climate change. But it is also possible that it could happen well before that, and so long as that’s possible we fight on.

Nothing short of everything will work: educate yourself, then your neighbors, get a chapter started of the Interfaith Power and Light at your church, write your legislators, confront (gently) denialists with the facts, join groups, tell the university that you graduated from to divest from fossil fuel suppliers after reading Bill McKibben’s Rolling Stone article, invite folks from other parts of the world to talk about what’s happening in their homeland, and if you travel, tell others about around here. If we all did this, the tide will be unstoppable.

If one starts with Kevin Anderson’s CO2 emissions trajectory to limit temperature increase to 2 C, and then tightens the conditions to account for the fact that he did not include positive feedbacks in this computations, one finds that eliminating all use of fossil fuels yesterday might limit the temperature increase to 2 C. Given that some use of fossil fuels will be required to convert to renewables and relocate coastal infrastructure, dodging the bullet will require three main conditions: use of fossil fuels for only the most critical requirements; reforestation to remove CO2 from atmosphere; geoengineering to prevent runaway, for the interim term. Where do you see any evidence that people will be willing to make the sacrifices required to achieve the above? You are operating on blind faith, essentially on the power of prayer, and to me that is denial of the grim reality.

Climate change polls seem to suggest that perhaps 70% of the American public believe in the reality of climate change and something needs to be done. If their responses had any credibility, one would expect to see significant changes in personal behavior related to energy use from a majority of one’s acquaintainces. I see none! What am I missing?

I would say that yes, fewer and fewer folks are counting on the viability of a top-down approach working, as the data is overwhelmingly grim in this area. The Doha meeting rearranged the chairs on the deck of the sinking ship a little, the disinformation campaign of the denialists continues complete with congressional hearings like this one, and on and on.

But more and more folks are noticing. Hurricane Sandy stirred up a lot of folks, and even some politicians spoke straight about what more and more folks are thinking. The Citizens Climate Lobby is growing by leaps and bounds. Folks are attending the McKibben Do the Math tour and going home to organize. The Interfaith Power and Light group has some real traction where there was none.

Will it be enough and soon enough? Time will tell. These are Hail Mary passes and there’s some question as to whether the buzzer has gone off, but to not join in the efforts is definitely the wrong choice if we care at all about the future.

Precisely so, I fear. As the economy falls apart, other social problems will foully blossom and proliferate.

The economic death spiral will curtail oil production, feeding it. Agriculture will collapse. Less agriculture, less economic activity. The Third World, with its large Muslim population, will suffer the worst effects. They’re likely to blame the West. Terrorism will surge. It’s not hard to imagine attacks on the massive oil export facility at Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia, or coal-fired electric generating stations here in the US. The lack of energy will accelerate and deepen unrest.

As the fossil-fuel-based way of life becomes more hated and blamed, the deniers will become more beleaguered. Like any power structure facing its own extinction (cf Germany and Japan in WW2, or Assad in Syria today), they will fight desperately to stop this inevitability, and they’ll have a convenient trope: patriotism. If you DON’T use fossil fuels, you are aiding and abetting the enemy, those who want to bring America down. We can’t win the climate change battle if we are weaker than our foes, they will say.

So using fossil fuels even as the climate falls down around our ears will be a DUTY in their eyes, and those who refuse the duty will be traitors.

Ken: “These are Hail Mary passes and there’s some question as to whether the buzzer has gone off, but to not join in the efforts is definitely the wrong choice if we care at all about the future.”

Thanks for that reminder.

I am past optimistic we can escape 2 degrees but have hope and intent to buy time for our children and future generations to prepare while we/they diminish the full impact. An important distinction..somewhere between mitigation and adaptation and yet to be defined.

I think Superman nailed it. There is no way to avoid this coming catastrophe. I had been thinking that, if the Earth lost maybe 5-7 billion people within the next 20 years, then maybe we would have had a chance. But not any more.

The coasts will be battered and flooded by toxic/acidic marine water. The Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio watershed will dry up and turn into a desert. [That will happen sooner than most of you think; this will be the second straight year with no snowpack in the mountains. I think we’ll be able to wade across the Mississippi at St. Louis within 5 years.] At least 90% of America’s citizens will become climate refugees. And the worse part is that the U.S. will have it easy compared to the rest of the world. But they’ll probably kill most of each other off in wars that we will be powerless to do anything about.

You can have all the hope you want but, to paraphrase Bad Santa, poop in one hand and hope in the other and lets see which one fills up first.

A big correction is coming courtesy of Mother Nature. I’ll call it “Black Death II”. Good luck to you all. If you’re lucky, maybe I’ll see you in the Great Lakes labor camps; if not… RIP.

Just one example: in 2003, on the floor of the Senate, he implied that most scientists expected “global cooling “ and takes statements from a 1972 National Science Board article to prove it.

Yet in the very same article is also the statement:

At the same time increasing concentration of industrial carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should lead to a temperature increase by absorption of infrared radiation from the Earth’s surface.

Here is the full quote: “Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end, to be followed by a long period of considerably colder temperatures leading to the next glacial age some 20,000 years from now. However, it is possible, or even likely, that human interference has already altered the environment so much that the climatic pattern of the near future will follow a different path. For instance, widespread deforestation in recent centuries, especially in Europe and North America, together with increased atmospheric opacity due to man-made dust storms and industrial wastes, should have increased the Earth’s reflectivity. At the same time increasing concentration of industrial carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should lead to a temperature increase by absorption of infrared radiation from the Earth’s surface. When these human factors are added to such other natural factors as volcanic eruptions, changes in solar activity, and resonances within the hydro-atmosphere, their effect can only be estimated in terms of direction, not of amount (National Science Board 1972)”

With his nauseating down-home “common man” touch, he often invokes the Creator to peddle his fantasies. As if God somehow protects us from our childish hubris (we can do any damn fool thing we want with our environment, and … no problem) or guarantees us a planet recall if we screw up this one.

If that isn’t taking the Lord’s name in vain, I don’t know what is.

I think the Creator will have a real treat waiting for the Senator, for his planned misdirection is, simply, a sin. The Bible says, “do not put a stumbling block before the blind”.

But then, perhaps, he is unconcerned, and to this Senator, the Lord too is a hoax.

Senator Inhofe cannot now be convicted of criminal negligence. But, as the poster child of the “It’s All Hooey” crowd, his delaying tactics create far more suffering than the criminally insane.

The World Health Organization, in the year 2000 estimated 130,000 deaths directly attributable to climate change. No doubt it is many times worse now.

This is the scenario to fear most. These end-times crackpots are 100% inimical to facts or reason, and feel besieged. As the climate degrades or, worse, suffers an abrupt change (driven by the disappearance of the Arctic ice cap), they will be enraged. To them, it will look Biblical. God will have withdrawn His favor.

What do religious zealots do when God withdraws His favor? They look to punish those who provoked God’s wrath. We know who the scapegoats will be: gays, atheists, environmentalists, socialists, immigrants, racial minorities, and anyone else who doesn’t fit the Old Testament model of how God intended the world to be. Which is to say, those whose very existence inherently challenges the dominion of white men.

Dominionism–the idea that the earth was created by God for His chosen to use and dominate–is an antebellum attitude (and it is an attitude, not a philosophy) which persists 150 years after the Civil War. This attitude will be fiercely aroused when the climate collapses.

All the science-denying Bible-thumpers are going to rally to defend this most egregiously immoral situation–the continued use of fossil fuels, even as the climate collapses–in the name of God. That’s exactly what happened with slavery, another grossly immoral but deeply ingrained social construct. Slavery was put forward as the natural order of things, consecrated by God. The true believers took up arms to defend that outlook.

The UN is a convenient bogeyman that represents an invasion threat, a loss of “liberty,” even though that liberty is to destroy the ecosphere. The Antichrist meme is all about a last great battle. It is explicitly violent and lethal. This story warns that what happened in 1861 could happen again.

Yes, and we put an end to that, eh? These people are dangerously looney and will cause as much trouble as they can, but ultimately they represent a small minority of kooks and can be defeated. Hopefully, it won’t take another civil-war — just an not-so-civil debunking.

Ok. He’s got the name, but the British Parliament has made it abundantly clear that the fellow is not a member of the House of Lords, nor should he make an emblem for himself resembling the emblem for Parliament. He’s been misrepresenting himself in so many ways.

Technically, while he is not a sitting member of the House of Lords (and has been required by that House to quit claiming he is), he is still hereditary nobility by British reckoning, and hence has as much right to the appellation “lord” as I have to “doctor” (I’ve an earned Ph.D.)

One can find a few folks with earned Ph.D.’s who are also paid, professional liars and hypocrites denying the reality of climate change. So the one appellation is as readily sullied as the other.

F.O.X. = 6.6.6.
Using a simplified version of ancient hebraic gematria, you can reduce each letter of the english alphabet down to a single digit. Just take the number of the sequence of the letter, when you reach 10 and above, simply add the two digits together so: a=1, b=2, c=3… j=10=1+0=1, k=11=1+1=2, l=3, m=4, n=5, etc. If you do this to every letter of the english alphabet, you will discover that there are only three letters that can be reduced to six:
F = 6
O = 15 = 1+5 = 6
X = 24 = 2+4 = 6
F.O.X. = 6.6.6.http://www.facebook.com/f6o6x6

Besides this, Inhofe done some other mighty embarrassing things since the last time he was elected in 2008, like “reckless disregard for human life” while landing an airplane in 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Inhofe

The forecast for the next three months calls for warmer than average temperatures for Oklahoma. Currently, 34.56% of Oklahoma is in exceptional drought.
Interpreting heat and drought in a Biblical context can be useful, but it can also get very strange.

We should address the people of Oklahoma that have repeatedly elected this pinhead to the congress & senate. There is no excuse and they clearly owe the world an apology for repeating this blatantly offensive mistake.
Here is another reason that there should competency testing when a member displays signs of dementia. “Inhofe your up next. Get McCain & Graham ready to follow.”

James Inhofe is #5 ($1,447,773) on who has received the most $’s from oil and gas industry interests since 1989. I’m sure he and his staff have independently and extensively researched climate change – and, surprise, finds along with the other Koch Bros. paid-for scientists (2% vs the other 98% of real life climate scientists), that there is little or no correlation or damage to our environment from man-created sources. In politics, just follow the money and you will find all your questions answered.

Just a thought: If this esteemed Senator Inhofe is advocating policies based on texts from the Christian Bible, is he not violating the constitutional provision against respecting an establishment of religion?

Yes and no, I’d guess.
In the 1770s there were state religions among the colonies, and England was certainly Anglican. As not all states had the same state religion, the “Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion” could have originally be limited to avoiding the conflict over selecting a single religion for all the former colonies. Of course, we have benefited from the protections accorded freedom of religion that go beyond that. In that sense, Inhofe is protected by freedom of expression, as long as he doesn’t try to put it into a law that denies others the same expression. Hope I got that right, as my ancestral constitutional law expert might be “looking down at me from heaven” so to speak.

“The more questions I asked, the clearer it became that Kyoto emissions reduction targets were arbitrary, lacking in scientific basis. This was not just my opinion, but the conclusion reached by the country’s most recognized climate scientists. Dr. Tom Wigley, one of Al Gore’s own scientists, was one of them. After President Clinton signed on to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, Dr. Wigley, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, found that if the Kyoto Protocol were fully implemented by all signatories, it would reduce temperatures by a mere 0.06 degrees Celsius by 2050. And that’s if the United States had ratified Kyoto and the other signatories met their targets. What does this mean? Such an amount is so small that ground-based thermometers cannot reliably measure it.”

Very persuasive… for deniers.

Oddly, Inhofe doesn’t mention the temperature rise in the business-as-usual scenario. Maybe he should be the senator from Michigan… he seems adept at cherry-picking…

“…But the problem was that places across America were not experiencing sweat on their brows in the middle of February but, instead, record cold temperatures – and that was kind of inconvenient for them. At the March 2007 hearing, I challenged Gore on that point. He had mentioned that the fires that were occurring in Oklahoma that year were due to global warming. So I asked him, “How come you guys never seem to notice it when it gets cold?” I held up a document from the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration that showed that there were 183 record cold temperatures in January 2007- 183 of them! As for Oklahoma, we had three cold days that year that were the coldest days in history. So I asked: where is global warming when you
really need it?”

I don’t understand …I thought they WANT the end of days, the anti-christ and the resulting rapture, where they will all float into heaven, while the rest of us stay below during the tribulations…..what have I missed? I say BRING IT ON.

My thoughts exactly and what I bring up time and again to the ‘thumpers.” I was raised in an Apocalyptic church in the 70s that found the anti-Christ in everything from Proctor and Gamble barcodes to President Reagan’s name. The end times were always a news headline away. Once I grew up and became a global thinker, I ask followers of this mentality – shouldn’t they be grateful? Shouldn’t they be absolutely joyful that the rapture is on the way and they will slip these worldly bounds and spend eternity in milk and honey? Never a real answer and they really don’t know how to confront someone who knows Revelations backwards and forwards. Sad, indeed. Better to let the planet melt down and blame it on a higher power instead of the power they look at in the mirror each morning.

The problem is, these three — and the shrinking number of global warming denialists around them — are imperturbable. No amount of fact, no unshakable mass of ratiocination, will deter them. They are true believers. And they will always find a following. But the devotees are the scary ones, either willing members of a witless mob or calculating monsters hiding behind the prophet’s zeal. Among the latter are oil and gas companies and politicians like Rep. Fred Upton and ex-Sen. Jim DeMint. Oklahoma, do you have any idea how tin-pail stupid you look?

There is a form of collective paranoia affecting the GOP — and it pairs well with their belief that a book based on verbal folklore and written thousands of years ago for superstitious and illiterate people has revealed the future and therefore, government must adhere to it.
These people are seriously disturbed.

Good news for the USA the United Nations and the World knows some Americans voted for lunatics/nutters/the insane crazies. Inhofe a true lunatic just brought some insane friends with him. America showed the World during the election we still have mentally ill people and religious leaders who are only interested in money and not religion.

If there is a God which I believe,its that Jesus character I have a problem with, why would he not put these people of lies in there place? There are these Evangelical running round denying the truth while they destroy this beautiful earth which God created in about 4.5 billion years. God took 4.5 billion years and now because of those Christians and right wing idea hogs, which these people support, they are trying to destroy it in seven days. If there is such a thing as anti Christ it will turn out to be people like Senator James Inhofe and all those who think like him. Lets face it if God wanted all that oil floating on the top of the Gulf of Mexico he would have put it there. Just saying

Why are Evangelical Christians so against the anti-Christ? According to their interpretation, the AC is necessary to bring about the end of the world where they’re all swept up into the sky with Jesus while the rest of us suffer Hell on Earth.

I always hear that cuckoo-cuckoo clock chime whenever I hear these lunatics (sorry Regress) bump their gums about the anti-christ and the end times. Geez, I curse the GOBPTEA-BAGGERKHRISTO-FASCISTS for unleashing these nuts into the mainstream